A Suprise Heli-Skiing Trip - "Hella" Cool...

“Dude, wake up!”
“Wha – what?” I said, barely conscious. The memory of the night before did not exist yet in my mind. Suffice it to say that drinking games and the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee on ESPN do not mix. My roommates and I had been up pretty late and were getting into the “action”, as it were, and I was sorely hung over. Or still drunk. I wasn’t sure which. What I did know for sure was that my roommate could have been whispering or yelling at me through a `50s cheerleading bullhorn, and I did not care. He just needed to shut up.
“Dude. You wanna do hella skiing this weekend?” he said.
Ah, yes. His stupid skiing trip. There must be fresh powder in the mountains or something. I didn’t care. I didn’t ski. I take it back – I don’t ski anymore. While trying to find parking on the weekends as families with screaming kids in giant vans take up two spots at once, and getting my badge while waiting for the screaming kids in front of me to figure out how to move in a line, to listening to screaming kids while waiting to get on the lift, to dealing with screaming kids, “extreme” snowboarding punks, and the hour-long wait to get on the lift again full of screaming kids sounded appealing, I didn’t want to go.
“That’s great, a**hole, a bunch of skiing, now blaghahafdahgh”, I said, unable to finish the sentence in my state.
“No, man. There’s going to be heli-skiing.”
After a brief round of “Who’s on first”-esque back-and forth, I figured out he was saying he wanted to heli-ski and not that there was going to be hella amounts of skiing. When he told me he would be skipping all that screaming kids crap, jumping off a helicopter and racing down a virtually untouched mountain, and that his friend had bailed out at the last second, I knew I had to go.
And it was awesome. There’s no other way to describe heli-skiing. I mean, are you getting it? It’s helicopter skiing. As in, you get into a helicopter, which is already incredible enough by itself. (In fact, I had never been on a helicopter before this.) Then, you jump out and you ski. No lifts anywhere in sight. Not one snot-nosed screaming brat or “extreme!” punks out there scarfing down Mountain Dews and calling you “gay” for no reason.
Nope. It was just me, a helicopter, and nature. The sheer thrill right before you drop out of the helicopter is almost unbearable, and you think it can’t be topped until you start racing down the mountain and realize that there is nowhere else for you to go but down. Chances are, it would take a long time for somebody to come up here on foot, if at all, and if that doesn’t make you feel like you’re getting in touch with, well, actually living, I don’t know what will.
I wish there was hella heli-skiing every weekend. I wish I wasn’t hung over the first time I went, but I don’t regret barely being able to type this because my adrenaline is still bursting from getting home this morning. If you’re looking for a real adrenaline rush, stop playing Madden or running around doing parkour, and get into a helicopter.